From Australian writer, journalist, filmmaker and political commentator Bob Ellis, comes a unique and fascinating night of prose, verse and music featuring works from some of the world’s most famous people including Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Philip Sidney, William Tyndale, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I.
Joining Ellis on stage will Denny Lawrence, Paul Bertram, Terry Clarke, Jane Harders, Nathaniel Pemberton and Natasha Vickery, all of whom will offer an unforgettable evening that, like The Hollow Crown and The Ages Of Man, will become a favourite outing in the coming years.
The Word Before Shakespeare will startle and delight every age group with its vigour and beauty.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A PLAY-READING.
Dates & Times:
7:00pm, Tuesday 5 November
7:00pm, Tuesday 12 November
Tickets:
All tickets $17*
*Transaction fees may apply
Links:
1. Master List of Words “Invented” by Shakespeare, and links to detailed tables.
2. The Concentrated List: Still-Common Words Invented by Shakespeare.
3. Common Words Commonly but Wrongly Attributed to Shakespeare.
Why did Shakespeare invent words?
Methodology.
IT TOOK A YEAR of painstaking research, grinding through thousands of words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been invented, or at least first employed on the written page, by William Shakespeare. But we have completed the project.
SO HOW MANY WORDS DID SHAKESPEARE INVENT?
William Shakespeare invented 594 words. This number does not include compound words.
The reason we do not count compound words in the list is that it is almost impossible to come up with a good definition of what should count as a compound word and what should not. For example, in Henry VI, Part I, Shakespeare wrote, “To me, blood–thirsty lord” (Act II, Scene iii). Based on this line, the Bard is given credit with inventing what is now a common compound word, bloodthirsty.
But take a look at these lines from various plays:
For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me (Macbeth, IV.i.122).
As cognizance of my blood–drinking hate (Henry VI, Part 1, II.iv.108).
If he i’ th’ blood-sized field lat swollen (The Two Noble Kinsman, I.i.99).
Are the bold-faced words genuine compound words? Probably yes.
Now take a look at these examples:
Here’s a Bohemian–Tartar tarries the coming down of thy fat woman (The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.v.18).
Would any but these boiled-brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? (The Winter’s Tale, III.iii.62).
It is like a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks…the brawn-buttock, or any buttock. (All’s Well That Ends Well, II.ii.17).
Should the bold-faced terms above be considered real compound words? They are listed in the indispensable dictionary, Shakespeare’s Words, by David and Ben Crystal as compound words; but the sentences also make perfect sense if these terms are accounted to be distinct words.
In sum, then, I have made the simple decision to not include what may or may not be compound words in the list of Shakespeare’s invented words. However, I have created a list of popular and still-commonly-used compound words which Shakespeare invented.
DID SHAKESPEARE REALLY INVENT WORDS?
Contrary to public belief, Shakespeare did not really “invent” words, in the sense that he, for example, decided he needed a word that means “cow”, but with four syllables, and so out of his imagination came up with the word “grabofillbert”. Rather, he adapted old words by fitting them with prefixes and suffixes, or by combining them, to give them a new sense.
We do use the word “invented” on this site, for two reasons: (1) it is a handy short-hand way to get the attention of internet researchers, and (2) to be gently ironic.
Why did Shakespeare invent words? Because (1) he needed a word; (2) he would have been in a hurry to complete any play he was working on, due to the publics great demand for new material, and (3) he did not have a dictionary or thesaurus to help. Indeed, the first dictionaries had not yet been written in the early 17th century.
NO ACCURATE INFORMATION AVAILABLE ANYWHERE (ESPECIALLY ON THE INTERNET)
In this section of our website, we will be presenting what we hope will be the most accurate list of words “invented” by William Shakespeare available anywhere – and also lists of words wrongly attributed to him!
The internet is filled with misinformation regarding words first created by the Bard.
The most persistent of the “facts” is that Shakespeare invented 1700 words; the number 1700 has taken off like a virus, and is casually tossed around by many individuals writing on the subject, despite the fact that there seems to be no particular authority for this number.
Several websites list some number of words attributed to Shakespeare; they all include words that even a bit of research would show do not belong there (they having been used previously to Shakespeare, and with the same meaning as Shakespeare used). They also mislead the inattentive reader, by failing to distinguish between
(1) words actually coined by Shakespeare, and
(2) words he adopted by using them
(a) in a new part of speech (e.g. using a traditional noun as a verb), or
(b) to mean something different.
Some sites even commingle Shakespeare’s original words with words they claim he “popularized”, whatever that means!
Undoubtedly the reason for these errors is that the venerable Oxford English Dictionary is believed to be, frankly, infallible. If you look up the word anchovy, bedroom, or hint, for example, the earliest citation listed is from the works of Shakespeare. However, a bit of research proves that the words all appeared in print well before Shakespeare ever even began writing plays and poems (considered to be around 1589-1590).
This is no fault of the OED’s; most of the OED’s entries have not been revisited in more than a century. The editors of the OED are in the early stages of a project to revise and update the dictionary, but this monumental task will take years, if not decades, to complete.
THE CREATION OF THE OED
Indeed, the creation of the OED (a fantastic story, told brilliantly by Simon Winchester in his 1999 book, The Professor and the Madman) ensured it would be far from perfect: its words and citations were provided over a period of decades by a world-wide army of volunteers, reading random old books and writing down words and quotes whenever a particular word or phrase caught their fancy. Such a subjective and helter-skelter approach was bound to be error-filled.
Frustrated by a lack of precise and correct information, your editor has begun a lengthy project to research and determine as accurate a list of words first used by Shakespeare available anywhere ever.
Click here to see the master list of words Shakespeare created, and links to detailed tables for all words, grouped by letter.
Click here to read why Shakespeare invented words.
Click here to learn about the methodology your humble servant is using for this project.
Inventors get a lot of love. Thomas Edison is held up as a tinkering genius. Steve Jobs is considered a saint in Silicon Valley. Hedy Lamar, meanwhile, may have been a Hollywood star but a new book makes clear her real legacy is in inventing the foundations of encryption. But while all these people invented things, it’s possible to invent something even more fundamental. Take Shakespeare: he invented words. And he invented more words—words that continue to shape the English language—than anyone else. By a long shot.
But what does it mean to “invent” words? How many words did Shakespeare invent? What kind of words? And which words are those exactly? Rather than just listing all the words Shakespeare invented, this post digs deeper into the how and the why (or “wherefore”) of Shakespeare’s literary creations.
How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent?
1700! My, what a perfectly round number! Such a large and perfectly round number is misleading at best, and is more likely just wrong—there is in fact a bunch of debate about the accuracy of this number.
So who’s to blame for the uncertainty around the number of words Shakespeare invented? For starters, we can blame the Oxford English Dictionary. This famous dictionary (often called the OED for short) is famous, in part, because it provides incredibly thorough definitions of words, but also because it identifies the first time each word actually appeared in written English. Shakespeare appears as the first documented user of more words than any other writer, making it convenient to assume that he was the creator of all of those words.
In reality, though, many of these words were probably part of everyday discourse in Elizabethan England. So it’s highly likely that Shakespeare didn’t invent all of these words; he just produced the first preserved record of some of them. Ryan Buda, a writer at Letterpile, explains it like this:
But most likely, the word was in use for some time before it is seen in the writings of Shakespeare. The fact that the word first appears there does not necessarily mean that he made it up himself, but rather, he could have borrowed it from his peers or from conversations he had with others.
However, while Shakespeare might have been just the first person to write down some words, he definitely did create many words himself, plenty of which we still use to this day. The list a ways down below contains the 420 words that almost certainly originated from Shakespeare himself.
But all this leads to another question. What does it even mean to “invent” a word?
How Did Shakespeare Invent Words?
Some writers invent words in the same way Thomas Edison invented light bulbs: they cobble together bits of sound and create entirely new words without any meaning or relation to existing words. Lewis Carroll does in the first stanza of his “Jabberwocky” poem:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Carroll totally made up words like “brillig,” “slithy,” “toves,” and “mimsy”; the first stanza alone contains 11 of these made-up words, which are known as nonce words. Words like these aren’t just meaningless, they’re also disposable, intended to be used just once.
Shakespeare did not create nonce words. He took an entirely different approach. When he invented words, he did it by working with existing words and altering them in new ways. More specifically, he would create new words by:
- Conjoining two words
- Changing verbs into adjectives
- Changing nouns into verbs
- Adding prefixes to words
- Adding suffixes to words
The most exhaustive take on Shakespeare’s invented words comes from a nice little 874-page book entitled The Shakespeare Key by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. Here’s how they explain Shakespeare’s literary innovations:
Shakespeare, with the right and might of a true poet, and with his peculiar royal privilege as king of all poets, has minted several words that deserve to become current in our language. He coined them for his own special use to express his own special meanings in his own special passages; but they are so expressive and so well framed to be exponents of certain particulars in meanings common to us all, that they deserve to become generally adopted and used.
We can call what Shakespeare did to create new words “minting,” “coining” or “inventing.” Whatever term we use to describe it, Shakespeare was doing things with words that no one had ever thought to do before, and that’s what matters.
Shakespeare Didn’t Invent Nonsense Words
Though today readers often need the help of modern English translations to fully grasp the nuance and meaning of Shakespeare’s language, Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have had a much easier go of it. Why? Two main reasons.
First, Shakespeare was part of a movement in English literature that introduced more prose into plays. (Earlier plays were written primarily in rhyming verse.) Shakespeare’s prose was similar to the style and cadence of everyday conversation in Elizabethan England, making it natural for members of his audience to understand.
In addition, the words he created were comprehensible intuitively because, once again, they were often built on the foundations of already existing words, and were not just unintelligible combinations of sound. Take “congreeted” for example. The prefix “con” means with, and “greet” means to receive or acknowledge someone.
It therefore wasn’t a huge stretch for people to understand this line:
That, face to face and royal eye to eye.
You have congreeted.(Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare also made nouns into verbs. He was the first person to use friend as a verb, predating Mark Zuckerberg by about 395 years.
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
Other times, despite his proclivity for making compound words, Shakespeare reached into his vast Latin vocabulary for loanwords.
His heart fracted and corroborate.
(Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1)
Here the Latin word fractus means “broken.” Take away the –us and add in the English suffix –ed, and a new English word is born.
New Words Are Nothing New
Shakespeare certainly wasn’t the first person to make up words. It’s actually entirely commonplace for new words to enter a language. We’re adding new words and terms to our “official” dictionaries every year. In the past few years, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has added several new words and phrases, like these:
- bokeh
- elderflower
- fast fashion
- first world problem
- ginger
- microaggression
- mumblecore
- pareidolia
- ping
- safe space
- wayback
- wayback machine
- woo-woo
So inventing words wasn’t something unique to Shakespeare or Elizabethan England. It’s still going on all the time.
But Shakespeare Invented a Lot of New Words
So why did Shakespeare have to make up hundreds of new words? For starters, English was smaller in Shakespeare’s time. The language contained many fewer words, and not enough for a literary genius like Shakespeare. How many words? No one can be sure. One estimates, one from Encyclopedia Americana, puts the number at 50,000-60,000, likely not including medical and scientific terms.
During Shakespeare’s time, the number of words in the language began to grow. Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains it this way:
The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for this purpose. Others advocated the revival of obsolete words and the adoption of regional dialect.
In Shakespeare’s collected writings, he used a total of 31,534 different words. Whatever the size of the English lexicon at the time, Shakespeare was in command of a substantial portion of it. Jason Kottke estimates that Shakespeare knew around 66,534 words, which suggests Shakespeare was pushing the boundaries of English vocab as he knew it. He had to make up some new words.
The Complete List of Words Shakespeare Invented
Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almost certainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare’s time. The result are 420 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from “academe” to “zany”:
- academe
- accessible
- accommodation
- addiction
- admirable
- aerial
- airless
- amazement
- anchovy
- arch-villain
- auspicious
- bacheolorship
- barefaced
- baseless
- batty
- beachy
- bedroom
- belongings
- birthplace
- black-faced
- bloodstained
- bloodsucking
- blusterer
- bodikins
- braggartism
- brisky
- broomstaff
- budger
- bump
- buzzer
- candle holder
- catlike
- characterless
- cheap
- chimney-top
- chopped
- churchlike
- circumstantial
- clangor
- cold-blooded
- coldhearted
- compact
- consanguineous
- control
- coppernose
- countless
- courtship
- critical
- cruelhearted
- Dalmatian
- dauntless
- dawn
- day’s work
- deaths-head
- defeat
- depositary
- dewdrop
- dexterously
- disgraceful
- distasteful
- distrustful
- dog-weary
- doit (a Dutch coin: ‘a pittance’)
- domineering
- downstairs
- dwindle
- East Indies
- embrace
- employer
- employment
- enfranchisement
- engagement
- enrapt
- epileptic
- equivocal
- eventful
- excitement
- expedience
- expertness
- exposure
- eyedrop
- eyewink
- fair-faced
- fairyland
- fanged
- fap
- far-off
- farmhouse
- fashionable
- fashionmonger
- fat-witted
- fathomless
- featureless
- fiendlike
- fitful
- fixture
- fleshment
- flirt-gill
- flowery
- fly-bitten
- footfall
- foppish
- foregone
- fortune-teller
- foul mouthed
- Franciscan
- freezing
- fretful
- full-grown
- fullhearted
- futurity
- gallantry
- garden house
- generous
- gentlefolk
- glow
- go-between
- grass plot
- gravel-blind
- gray-eyed
- green-eyed
- grief-shot
- grime
- gust
- half-blooded
- heartsore
- hedge-pig
- hell-born
- hint
- hobnail
- homely
- honey-tongued
- hornbook
- hostile
- hot-blooded
- howl
- hunchbacked
- hurly
- idle-headed
- ill-tempered
- ill-used
- impartial
- imploratory
- import
- in question
- inauspicious
- indirection
- indistinguishable
- inducement
- informal
- inventorially
- investment
- invitation
- invulnerable
- jaded
- juiced
- keech
- kickie-wickie
- kitchen-wench
- lackluster
- ladybird
- lament
- land-rat
- laughable
- leaky
- leapfrog
- lewdster
- loggerhead
- lonely
- long-legged
- love letter
- lustihood
- lustrous
- madcap
- madwoman
- majestic
- malignancy
- manager
- marketable
- marriage bed
- militarist
- mimic
- misgiving
- misquote
- mockable
- money’s worth
- monumental
- moonbeam
- mortifying
- motionless
- mountaineer
- multitudinous
- neglect
- never-ending
- newsmonger
- nimble-footed
- noiseless
- nook-shotten
- obscene
- ode
- offenseful
- offenseless
- Olympian
- on purpose
- oppugnancy
- outbreak
- overblown
- overcredulous
- overgrowth
- overview
- pageantry
- pale-faced
- passado
- paternal
- pebbled
- pedant
- pedantical
- pendulous
- pignut
- pious
- please-man
- plumpy
- posture
- prayerbook
- priceless
- profitless
- Promethean
- protester
- published
- puking (disputed)
- puppy-dog
- pushpin
- quarrelsome
- radiance
- rascally
- rawboned
- reclusive
- refractory
- reinforcement
- reliance
- remorseless
- reprieve
- resolve
- restoration
- restraint
- retirement
- revokement
- revolting
- ring carrier
- roadway
- roguery
- rose-cheeked
- rose-lipped
- rumination
- ruttish
- sanctimonious
- satisfying
- savage
- savagery
- schoolboy
- scrimer
- scrubbed
- scuffle
- seamy
- self-abuse
- shipwrecked
- shooting star
- shudder
- silk stocking
- silliness
- skim milk
- skimble-skamble
- slugabed
- soft-hearted
- spectacled
- spilth
- spleenful
- sportive
- stealthy
- stillborn
- successful
- suffocating
- tanling
- tardiness
- time-honored
- title page
- to arouse
- to barber
- to bedabble
- to belly
- to besmirch
- to bet
- to bethump
- to blanket
- to cake
- to canopy
- to castigate
- to cater
- to champion
- to comply
- to compromise
- to cow
- to cudgel
- to dapple
- to denote
- to dishearten
- to dislocate
- to educate
- to elbow
- to enmesh
- to enthrone
- to fishify
- to glutton
- to gnarl
- to gossip
- to grovel
- to happy
- to hinge
- to humor
- to impede
- to inhearse
- to inlay
- to instate
- to lapse
- to muddy
- to negotiate
- to numb
- to offcap
- to operate
- to out-Herod
- to out-talk
- to out-villain
- to outdare
- to outfrown
- to outscold
- to outsell
- to outweigh
- to overpay
- to overpower
- to overrate
- to palate
- to pander
- to perplex
- to petition
- to rant
- to reverb
- to reword
- to rival
- to sate
- to secure
- to sire
- to sneak
- to squabble
- to subcontract
- to sully
- to supervise
- to swagger
- to torture
- to un muzzle
- to unbosom
- to uncurl
- to undervalue
- to undress
- to unfool
- to unhappy
- to unsex
- to widen
- tortive
- traditional
- tranquil
- transcendence
- trippingly
- unaccommodated
- unappeased
- unchanging
- unclaimed
- unearthy
- uneducated
- unfrequented
- ungoverned
- ungrown
- unhelpful
- unhidden
- unlicensed
- unmitigated
- unmusical
- unpolluted
- unpublished
- unquestionable
- unquestioned
- unreal
- unrivaled
- unscarred
- unscratched
- unsolicited
- unsullied
- unswayed
- untutored
- unvarnished
- unwillingness
- upstairs
- useful
- useless
- valueless
- varied
- varletry
- vasty
- vulnerable
- watchdog
- water drop
- water fly
- well-behaved
- well-bred
- well-educated
- well-read
- wittolly
- worn out
- wry-necked
- yelping
- zany
Words That Shakespeare Invented – Resource List
- 10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented – Merriam-Webster does a great job dismantling myths. This article, in particular, tells you which words Shakespeare probably didn’t invent.
- 40 Words You Can Trace Back To William Shakespeare – Buzzfeed disregards the “never invented” words from Merriam, but does add a disclaimer: “That doesn’t necessarily mean he invented every word.”
- Invented Words – This page was the center of a disputatious brouhaha with the aforementioned Buzzfeed. As it stands, however, Google likes to deliver this as a top result when you search for “Words Shakespeare Invented.”
- 20 Words We Owe to Shakespeare – I like the way that the author of this article draws a parallel between Shakespeare and the LOL generation.
- Words and Phrases Coined by Shakespeare – This is a lengthy and straightforward list that mostly contains phrases rather than individual words.
- 21 everyday phrases that come straight from Shakespeare’s plays – This is a helpful resource due to the explanation of each phrase.
Words, words, words.
(Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)
The answer to this crossword puzzle is 3 letters long and begins with E.
Below you will find the correct answer to Before to Shakespeare Crossword Clue, if you need more help finishing your crossword continue your navigation and try our search function.
Crossword Answers for «Before to shakespeare»
Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Search clues
Do you know the answer?
RELATED CLUES
- Ere
- Bard of ___
- Before, poetically
- Byron’s «before»
- Before, to poets
- But i heard him exclaim, ___ he
- Bard’s preposition
SIMILAR CLUES
- Joseph, played shakespeare in shakespeare in love
- It meant before, before we used before
- Before, before we used «before»
- Julie — actress who played celine in richard linklater film trilogy before midnight before sunrise and before sunset
- Shakespeare’s «before»
- Before, to shakespeare
- Shakespeare: ». . . . . . . die many times before their deaths»
- Shakespeare’s niamh (who shall be nameless) shakes before 25 26 23
- Coming before shakespeare for black
- Before long, to shakespeare
- Part of shakespeare play before tea break is put into operation
- Words before and after or not in a shakespeare quote
- Shakespeare title word before well
- Before in shakespeare’s day
- Before long to shakespeare
- Word before before
- Small folded napkin put before the queen. it is used before the main course
- Sounds like before they lower you down at last before april arrives
- Before the present, before the present
- Before the end of saturday it’s gloomy before ten
OTHER CLUES
- Old bird in repeated act
- One keeping books in balance fled having concealed one
- On the radio, dealer is wine supplier
- Old england manager has lost five licences
- Old enough to finally smoke, given mates butt
- One of the two founders in leeds in 1884 of a
- Opened a tab as edge displays organised information
- One&rsquo s in the soup, hiding having punched crook
Shakespeare’s works have been a source of a tremendous range of expressions that we still use regularly today. This is just a sampling, but it gives you an idea of the wealth of material the Bard supplied to us.
One fell swoop Macduff, in the play Macbeth, is stunned to learn that his wife and children have all been killed in one orgy of slaughter. “What, all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop?” (fell meaning “deadly” in this case)
Unkindest cut of all The speech of Mark Anthony after Julius Caesar is killed in the play Julius Caesar, says that the stab wound from Brutus, once Caesar’s friend, was the unkindest cut of all.
Also from Julius Caesar, in referring to a speech given by Cicero in Greek, Cassius says of the speech, “those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.”
Hamlet has oodles of phrases that we still hear, and not just “Alas, poor Yorick.” From this one play we get “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” “To thine own self be true,” “Method in the madness,” “Sweets to the sweet,” “The lady doth protest too much,” “to the manner born” (note—it’s not “manor”—“To the Manor Born” was a British comedy that played on this phrase, but the original is “manner”), “The play’s the thing,” “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “the primrose path,” “Be cruel to be kind,” “it smells to heaven,” “Frailty, thy name is woman,” and “what a piece of work is man.”
Also, “in my mind’s eye” probably existed before Shakespeare included it in Hamlet, but it wasn’t widely known until he used it.
All the world’s a stage can be found in As You Like It, in the grimly humorous monologue by Jacques (pronounced Jake-weez in Shakerspeare’s day) about what he views as the seven stages of life.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances
Brave New World Is the title of a satirical novel by Aldous Huxley, in which science and technology have stripped the world of humanity. The phrase is often used to comment on advances that have both positive and negative results. The words are themselves an allusion to a line in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. When the innocent daughter of Prospero sees a group of people who are, in fact, her father’s enemies, but who delight her because they are new to her, she blurts out “O brave new world that has such people in it.”
A pound of flesh was the price Shylock would require for the loss of his daughter, in The Merchant of Venice. Also from this play came “A blinking idiot,” “All that glisters is not gold,” “bated breath,” and “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
Salad days This one comes from Antony and Cleopatra, when the Egyptian queen refers to her youth: “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.”
Neither rhyme nor reason is from The Comedy of Errors.
That way madness lies Perhaps it’s not too surprising that this comes from King Lear.
Double, double toil and trouble in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, three witches stir a cauldron while reciting a “recipe” for trouble that begins with these words and includes “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, /Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.” These famous lines are now often used to suggest or imitate spells or witchcraft.